Craigellachie Distillery

The Craigellachie Distillery is located just downstream from Macallan, where the River Fiddich joins the Spey, in the town of Craigellachie. Route A95 meets up with route A941 here. The landscape is a series of rolling hills and grassy farms.

In 1891, Alexander Edward organized a group of local blenders and Whisky merchants to finance the opening of Craigellachie Distillery. The men were a unique mix of Whisky-lovers and businessmen -- meaning they knew quality, and how to make money.

The distillery was reorganized and/or sold in 1896, 1916, 1927, and 1930. Then it entered an era of good production. The place was retooled and refurbished in 1964, and capacity was doubled. John Dewers and Sons purchased it in 1998.

Craigellachie is another high-production shop -- yielding upwards of 4 million liters per year. The vast majority is used in the creation of Dewers various blends.

Craigellachie is in high demand for blends, because of its unique "meaty" characteristics, caused by the low copper content of the worm tubes used to cool the spirit as it comes out of the stills.

The high demand means that official single malt releases have been few and far between, for its entire history. But recently (2014) permission has been granted to reserve enough single malt, to create a consistent supply of this unique dram on the shelves for their fans.

Flavor Spiral™

About The Flavor Spiral

smoky

oak

spicy

sherry

dried fruit

vanilla

honey

sweet

green apple

What does Craigellachie taste like?

The Flavor Spiral™ shows the most common flavours that you'll taste in Craigellachie Scotch. It's based on all Craigellachie drinks in our large database and gives you a chance to taste Craigellachie before actually tasting it.

We invented Flavor Spiral™ here at Flaviar to get all your senses involved in tasting drinks and, frankly, because we think that classic tasting notes are boring.

Craigellachie is about 1500 feet away from Speyside Cooperage -- the most productive independent Whisky cask maker in Scotland. They turn out more than 100,000 casks per year to the local Speyside producers.

One reason that they now have enough production to meet the needs of Dewers, and issue their own single malt, is that in 2017 they switched to a seven-day work week.

The most densely populated Whisky region in the world sits in a fertile valley of rivers and glens. Home to over half of Scotland’s distilleries, malts from these fifty or so Speyside distilleries are hard to summarize, as there's a lot of flavour variety.

One thing we can say is that they're known for being frugal with peat and lavish with nutty fruit flavours. Apple, pear, honey, vanilla and spice all have a part to play in the Speyside Whiskies. Speyside Whisky also knows its way around a Sherry cask.